


The Great Escape

by bookstorequeer



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock - Fandom
Genre: British Military, Depression, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Grief/Mourning, Non-Graphic Violence, Possibly Pre-Slash, Post Reichenbach, References to Suicide, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 16:49:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookstorequeer/pseuds/bookstorequeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His chest is tight when he has to explain why he's trying to rejoin the army after so many years away and he has trouble finding the words to clarify that he doesn't want to be in London <strike>if Sherlock isn't</strike> anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Escape

**Author's Note:**

> [wellingtongoose's website](http://wellingtongoose.tumblr.com/semantics) was immeasurably helpful in this (and what's wrong, well, I just changed it to fit).
> 
> Also, I'm Canadian, so I'm sure there are some differences in our ways of speaking. Oh and if there are any tense problems, please don't hesitate to let me know!
> 
> The title is based on Pink's song, "[The Great Escape](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wl5-audkPY)," which really helped this all come together.
> 
> [Also posted on my lj](http://bookstorequeer.livejournal.com/110042.html).

**The Great Escape**  
Sherlock dies on a Tuesday. They bury him on a Thursday, and it’s four more Thursdays of Mrs Hudson dropping by for tea, Sarah tip-toeing around him at the clinic, and even Mycroft being not-very-subtle with his surveillance, before John wakes up and breaks the lock on the drawer that his service revolver is in. He doesn’t bother trying to unlock it because he came home from Sherlock’s funeral and the key was missing. That Friday afternoon, his hand won’t stop shaking until he finishes a letter to Mrs Hudson that he leaves on the mantle beside the gap in the dust where the skull used to be. He isn’t sure where  _that_  ended up but he likes to think that maybe Mycroft has kept it.  
  
He isn't unfamiliar with this type of grief, or the numbness that comes with it. He had been as disoriented after he and Harry had lost their parents to cancer and a drunk driver in such quick succession. He’d joined the army after the last funeral, only four months after the first, and Harry still hasn’t forgiven him for it.  
  
“They’re barely cold!” she’d screamed at him when he told her. John hadn’t known how to explain why he was leaving his nearly complete residency rotation for sand and war. In his chest, his heart was too still with sympathetic death and grief to find the words to make his grieving sister stop yelling. She’d slapped him in front of their remaining extended family and he’d walked away to Afghanistan without looking back.  
  
This time it’s more than just his sister that he’s leaving behind but John can’t face the echoes of an empty flat and he closes the door tightly behind him before catching a cab to the London District Regional Training Centre on Handel Street. His duffle is already packed and he’s left the cane at home since he didn’t need it upon waking. Making the decision to re-enlist has settled something within him; there’s a well of grief in his chest but John’s looking forward and trying to ignore the depression that’s clawing at him.  
  
The recruiter is sceptical of his ability and his age but signs John up anyway. They make him jump through hurdles that are easier than anything he’s followed Sherlock over and he passes the psychological evaluation with barely a hitch. His sessions with Ella have taught him all the things not to say; his chest is tight when he has to explain why he’s trying to rejoin the army after so many years and he has trouble finding the words to clarify that he doesn’t want to be in London  ~~if Sherlock isn’t~~  anymore. After that, it’s too easy to give them the answers they’re looking for, because his medical and military training are things that they need so desperately.  
  
They try to talk him out of signing on to be a medical support officer but John’s insistent. He’s been both a doctor and a soldier; now he wants to be a medic. They seem concerned at how unconcerned he is about the increased level of danger that goes with the front-line position, but he’s already been shot once and they figure he must know what he’s getting himself into.  
  
His shoulder still aches when it’s too cold and too damp but his limp is gone so they don’t do more than make a note in his file. He meets the physical requirements within acceptable parameters and signs on for another hitch without wondering who’s going to replace the flowers on Sherlock’s grave when they wither. With dog tags around his neck again, he’s better at pretending that gallivanting around London with a genius in a ridiculous coat was all a dream.  
  
  
Through the re-conditioning and the extra training to be an army paramedic, John settles into his new regiment. They’re too new and largely unscarred but no one asks him what his nightmares are about because they’re too busy ignoring their own, and John is grateful. He just drinks his coffee black and pretends that head wounds and dark curls don’t make him want to vomit. He cries when they can’t see him and ignores when they try to thank him for the risks he takes to keep them alive. Every morning he struggles against the numbness that’s trying to settle in, and sits with the boys, eating breakfast and watching the sun rise.  
  
“Hey, Watson! Me and the boys are going to the pub,” Corporeal Jamieson says, interrupting the ratty paperback that John’s been staring at for an hour. They’ve got a few days before they ship out again and the replacements in the regiment seem nervous – most of them haven’t done this before and John has too many scars for his experience to be very reassuring.  
  
“Right,” is all he says, climbing to his feet and tossing the book aside without bothering to mark his place; Private Camden already spoiled it, yelling at how unfair it was that some two-bit character from the second chapter was the killer. John had been so vividly reminded of Sherlock ranting at some crime show on the telly that he’d tasted blood and had to close his eyes to regain his balance.  
  
The pub is dimly lit and his pint is an ale too dark for his liking but it’s nothing he ever did with Sherlock, so John’s content to spent some time here. He lets the boys rustle him into a game of pool and does well enough to win Jamieson a tenner, sitting out the next round and writing Harry a beer-soaked letter on a spare napkin. She hasn’t spoken to him since he’d gotten his new orders and he isn’t 100% sure that she won’t just toss out any post from him. Still, it’s better than the letters he never writes down when he wakes in the middle of the night with his heart beating itself senseless against his ribs and Sherlock’s name sour on his tongue. Those letters involve too many  _please_ s and  _don’t be dead_ s that won’t get an answer, for him to ever write down.  
  
  
“Watson, post!”  
  
He ducks the box tossed at him and winces when it hits the wall with a dull thud. It’s his first package and he’s just hoping there had been nothing breakable in there because it’s definitely broken now.  
  
“Jamieson, head’s up! Camden, letter from your mummy, princess.”  
  
Sergeant Wade moves down the row of bunks but John still rolls his eyes and flips the sergeant off before staring at the package, all tied with string. It’s a little battered, one corner caved in and postage stamps from the last two countries he’d been in, as the army tried to find him to deliver it. It takes him a long minute to recognize Mrs Hudson’s handwriting but when he does, he doesn’t want to open it.  
  
“Who’s the care package from, Watson?” Jamieson asks, flopping on the bunk opposite.  
  
John shakes his head, in denial or refusal to answer, he isn’t quite sure. He suddenly has a horrible fear that she’s sent him the skull and he can’t bear the thought that the army might have broken it. His fingers are hesitant as they tear into the plain paper but Jamieson doesn’t say anything because this is the first piece of post he’s had in months.  
  
There’s a letter at the top of the box, a tin of stale cookies below that which still, somehow, taste like home, a few pairs of socks that it takes him a moment to recognize, and that bloody scarf, all scrunched and crumpled at the bottom like an afterthought.  
  
“ _A touch of home…_ ” Mrs Hudson says in her letter. John’s jaw aches from clenching his teeth so fiercely together against a rise of grief when she says that she thought he could use some comfortable, non-army issue socks and, “ _It’s not like Sherlock’s going to miss them, dear._ ”  
  
They’re in the middle of the desert, he’s had sand stuck between his toes for at least a fortnight, and John’s never been more grateful to have a pair of soft socks in his sorry life. He stows the other pairs at the very bottom of his pack and wears them out one duo at a time. He doesn’t even feel guilty when he lies to Wade about having any extra pairs.  
  
Mrs Hudson doesn’t mention the scarf and John’s embarrassingly glad for that. The less said about the way he clutches at it, the better. For longer than he should let himself, John squeezes his eyes shut and runs the fabric through his fingers; the soft wool catches on renewed calluses but he can’t bring himself to stop. He sleeps with it wrapped around his wrist and dreams of dinner at Angelo’s and the way Sherlock used to tell him about the lives of the people dining around them; John was never sure if the consulting detective was making it up or just showing off, but it always made him laugh. The scarf is a vivid blue against the sand and John hides it from the boys of the regiment not because he’s embarrassed by the trinket but because he can’t explain how much it means to have it. He never expected it and the sight of it always makes his chest clench like a piece of grief breaking off to lodge in his lungs.  
  
He had thought that being away from London would make it easier not to miss Sherlock but he’s starting to ache when he thinks about waking up to that damned violin in the middle of the night, and being handed the phone to reply to Mycroft when Sherlock couldn’t be bothered. John’s surprised when he gets a letter from Lestrade on his birthday and finds himself wishing for Chinese food after a case and even fighting with Anderson about cause of death. The letters reminded him that he’s left behind more than Sherlock’s ghost.  
  
He talks with Jamieson, sometimes, when they’re both missing home and wishing for something more familiar than the sounds of nightmares and firefights. Their regiment has become their family; he’s trained to help them, to triage and to keep them alive. In turn, they’ve kept him from drowning in depression because there are days when he doesn’t even have time to feel the sorrow. Over time, John starts telling Jamieson about Sherlock. Just little things, at first, the things about his flatmate that had frustrated him. Then, what he misses. But never what he wishes he’d done. Those are the more elusive things, the more intangible and wistful, painful because they will never come to be. That’s when John’s voice always fails him and Jamieson sits for a heartbeat or so before telling John all about his girl back home, letting the moment pass until it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.  
  
  
John is spending the day on loan with another regiment who are down a medic, when he gets shot again. They're overrun by hostiles and as the pain rips across his ribs, John suddenly wishes that Sherlock was there with such force that he knows if there’s any magic in the world, it would have come true. But it doesn’t, and he falls into the side of a sand dune, waking a day and half later to see Mycroft staring down at him.  
  
At first, hazy on painkillers and dehydration, John is sure that he’s hallucinating or still dreaming and any minute now Major Speirs will yell at him to ship out,  _on the double_.  
  
Instead, Mycroft sighs and shakes his head, more animated than John has ever seen him.  
  
“I told him this would happen,” the elder, remaining Holmes mutters and that, more than anything, convinces John that he can’t be dreaming because even in his wildest imaginings, Mycroft never  _mutters_.  
  
Those cool-glass eyes fix on him.  
  
“Are you ready to come home, Captain Watson?”  
  
He shakes his head.  
  
“I could pull some strin—”  
  
“I can’t.”  
  
He can’t face that flat, still so permeated with Sherlock that it stinks of him, the air vibrating like his violin has been set down an instant before and John has just missed it. The medic himself is still too mired in what is  _missing_  to see what remains. He knows there’s an end to this dark tunnel because he’s gone through it and come out the other side, orphaned but all right; he just isn’t there yet, not over Sherlock or his grief, and the idea of going back now is inducing a panic attack.  
  
“I’m not ready.”  
  
“John…”  
  
“No! I said… No, Mycroft. This isn’t something the power of Her Majesty’s Government can fix.  _I_  am not something you can just fix.”  
  
War had forged his grief into something manageable the last time and he’s still counting on it to the same with this loss. When there isn’t time or space to break down, John finds that he just has to keep breathing and moving and, eventually, that becomes easier.  
  
“This isn’t healthy, John.”  
  
“Yeah? Well, I don’t really care.”  
  
Mycroft’s face twists and John turns away without attempting to decipher the look. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, it’s afternoon and the faculty doctors are around to poke at him.  
  
In the end, the injury isn’t bad enough to send him home again and since they don’t seem able to tell that some days John is holding on by the skin of his teeth, he’s released to his regiment once his ribs knit back together. Jamieson is happy to see him and even Camden seems to have missed him; John just breathes a little easier knowing that Mycroft hasn’t gone ahead with his meddling.  
  
There are still split seconds where missing Sherlock hurts so intensely that he can’t breathe – like when he learns that Camden is naturally a redhead and has been dying his hair their whole tour; John turned to ask Sherlock why he hasn’t deduced it, and swayed where he stood when the other man isn’t there.  
  
But most mornings are getting easier. Telling Jamieson all the things about Sherlock that had driven him up the wall and writing Mrs Hudson about all the things they’d liked, have helped to blunt the edges on missing the man. The grief in his chest dries up so slowly that John barely notices until he goes a whole day without once wanting to yell at Sherlock for being unable to finagle his way out of that last damn mess. Then it’s two days. Then three. And almost before he knows it, John has served another year and a half on his hitch.  
  
It’s still a twinge in his chest some days in the convalescent centre when his leg throbs with a compound fracture bad enough to need six screws in the bone, and John wishes that the consulting detective was there to fix him. But when the great war machine decides that this is one badly broken bone too many and that they’re spitting him back out to reclaim his life, John Watson is once again at peace with the idea of being a civilian.  
  
His skin is more threadbare in a few places but it’s easier to breathe with the added practice. He’s had men die beneath his hands, bleeding into the sand and choking on the desert, but he’s also stitched the boys back together and there was, once again, something almost soothing in all the times he’s helped them cheat death. It helps when his mind turns towards remembered trauma or grief.  
  
He has a letter for Jamieson’s girl in his pocket, a promise to deliver Roque’s dog tags to his mother’s house, and requests from each man in his regiment that he write them with more stories of life-with-the-consulting-detective. He could have just directed them to the website but John has found the contentment that Ella had always told him about in writing down his stories in letters.  
  
  
The trip home is a long one. He’s learned to sleep anywhere and a six-hour coach flight is no exception, but his leg has been badly cramped for the last half hour and his head is aching from all the fluorescent lights and chaos in the terminal. He’s absurdly touched when one of Mycroft’s cars is outside with his name on it. He’s almost surprised by the man, after three years with no Sherlock to tie them together but just nods and smiles tiredly at the driver, firming his grip on his duffle when the other man reaches for it.  
  
“I’ve got it,” he reassures, not keen to make anyone else carry his dirty laundry, complete with the threadbare scarf carefully laid on top. He settles heavily into the back of the car instead, laying the crutch the doctors gave him alongside his bad leg.  
  
“Hello, John.”  
  
His body has just been uncoiling when he hears that familiar voice; now he understands why Mycroft sent the damned car and he wishes he’s taken a cab instead.  
  
“You’re dead.”  
  
He doesn’t open his eyes because he’s had this hallucination before, when the pain is worst or his throat is raw with the dehydration that had nearly killed him when his regiment was trapped behind the enemy’s lines for over a week.  
  
“I am not.”  
  
John shakes his head, eyes still squeezed shut. He knows the tiny sounds of that familiar sulk, in the fidgets and in the sighs that he’s never quite figured out if he’s supposed to hear, but he still refuses to look. His leg hurts, he’s exhausted from travelling, and he really doesn’t want to deal with this right now.  
  
“Yes, you are. Because I buried you, Sherlock. And even you would not make me bury an empty casket.”  
  
“John…”  
  
He cracks a tired eye and exhales noisily.  
  
“You look like you. You sound like you. You probably even take a punch like you,” he agrees. “But I’m tired, Sherlock, and if you’re really alive, then you’ll know that I’m right pissed at you.”  
  
“At me? Why are you angry with me?”  
  
“Bit not good, Sherlock. Faking your death is a  _bit_  not good.”  
  
“Oh. Well, yes, that.”  
  
“Yes, that.”  
  
John glares at the other man and Sherlock makes an attempt at looking sheepish. He’s better at it than John had figured he might have been; maybe some things have changed in the past three years.  
  
“So shut up and let me sleep. I’ll be cross with you when we get back to the flat.”  
  
“Fine. But, John…?”  
  
He bites down on a sigh.  
  
“What, Sherlock?”  
  
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”  
  
John can’t stop himself from smiling as he rolls his eyes and allows himself to finally start to relax.  
  
“Afghanistan, Sherlock, just like last time.”  
  
 **End.**


End file.
